Alleged hacker Albert "Segvec" Gonzalez was close to signing off on a comprehensive plea agreement that would have settled all pending charges when he was indicted on new counts Monday, according to a published report that cited his lawyer.

Consumer protection watchdog the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) will investigate online pricing tactics and internet advertising techniques that mislead consumers, it has said. It will also probe price comparison sites and behavioural advertising.

AnalysisArchiving is no big bucks bonanza. Look at the declining tape business, the collapse of Plasmon, and Copan struggling to survive. Yet in this harsh environment, startup ProStor, with its removable disk technology, appears to be booming.

To read the Sony press release, you’d think that it had virtually invented the Lithium Ion battery in the first place, but now it has come up with a breakthrough next step – with a battery that will survive far more charges and discharges without its performance decaying.

Research in Motion (Rim) would probably describe every BlackBerry as flash, but now the firm’s phones look set to become even more so: rumours are circulating that full Adobe Flash support is on its way to the range.

US forces have become the latest to adopt a throwable camera system, intended to let combat troops see inside rooms, around corners and so on without exposing themselves to danger. Israeli forces have also used such equipment: the UK's MoD, by contrast, has chosen to fund British firms to develop a homegrown alternative.

The chances of an international climate agreement being made at Copenhagen in December were already looking unlikely - but Japanese scientist Dr Syun Akasofu thinks we may as well call it off completely.

The Met has agreed to destroy DNA and fingerprints taken from Tory Immigration spokesman Damian Green last December - and they will delete other police records too. This follows a four-month battle, much foot-dragging, and a statement by ACPO that sounds suspiciously like yet more "off the cuff" law-making by the Police.

ReviewThe main selling point for the Samsung S8000 Jet isn't its OLED screen, or its 5Mp camera, or even its sleek and compact good looks. For this model, Samsung is highlighting a major element of the modern multimedia phone that often gets overlooked – the processor. The Samsung S8000 Jet comes with an industry-leading 800MHz processor – more powerful even than those on the big smartphones – which should make everything about it run faster and smoother.

Reader WorkshopAs discussed earlier this week there is growing interest in desktop virtualization, despite many IT professionals having limited detailed knowledge of the technologies in this area. The chart below, for example, taken from a Reg Tech Panel survey, indicates a good awareness of the potential benefits across all sizes of organisation.

NASA has announced a successful live test of a prototype inflatable heat shield for re-entry to a planet's atmosphere. The blow-up shield could have important implications for future missions to Mars - and also, perhaps, for the nascent field of orbital spacesuit skydiving.

The IEEE has brought together an alliance of anti-virus vendors in an industry group that aims to improve and better organise collaboration, with an initial focus on better standards for malware sample sharing.

AnalysisCoverage of recent US Navy research into producing jet fuel from CO2 and hydrogen has been widely reported under headlines such as "making jet fuel from seawater". The coverage illustrates not only declining modern understanding of science and technology, but also the sad eclipse of proper science fiction by vampire-lust fantasies.

Grid and cluster computing management software company Platform Computing has inked a distribution agreement with graphics chip maker nVidia. It will see the HPC expert bundle nVidia's CUDA programming environment with its cluster management tools and integrate it into those tools.

ROTMFuturists generally agree that autonomous robots will one day helm mankind's vehicles - largely due to the idea being totally awesome, but also because jet packs and rocket cars are terribly out of fashion within the profession.

Two years ago, Apple chief exec Steve Jobs suggested to Palm's then-CEO Ed Colligan that the two companies agree not to hire each other's employees. Colligan reportedly refused, saying such a deal would be "likely illegal".

Next week, the IEEE's annual Hot Chips conference will be take place at California's Stanford University, and it looks like there's an eight-core ante for any microprocessor vendor who wants to make a presentation.

For the past five months, a website for investment services giant Ameriprise Financial contained bugs that allowed even low-level criminals to inject malicious content into official company webpages and steal user's cookies, according to a web security expert.